Assaults on Judicial Independence under the Pretense of Modernization: Evidence from Venezuela

TL;DR

This paper examines how populist government interventions in Venezuela's judiciary, disguised as modernization, significantly undermine judicial independence, with robust evidence from a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences methodology to isolate the impact of populist assaults on judicial independence in Venezuela.

Findings

Authoritarian interventions cause immediate judicial independence decline.

Judicial deterioration persists over time and is robust to various checks.

The effect is not driven by pre-existing judicial changes.

Abstract

We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo Ch\'avez and implemented through a judicial emergency committee. We employ a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of populist attacks on judicial independence trajectories. By comparing Venezuela to a stable pool of countries without radical constitutional changes, our identification strategy isolates the effect of populist assaults from unobservable confounders and common time trends. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence vis-\'a-vis the estimated counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples.